Yankees ace Whitey Ford dies at 91
NEW YORK » During an era when the Yankees won the World Series so routinely it was joked that rooting for them was like rooting for General Motors, their ace pitcher owned the most fitting nickname: “The Chairman of the Board.”
Whitey Ford, the streetsmart New Yorker who had the best winning percentage of any pitcher in the 20th century and helped the Yankees become baseball’s perennial champions in the 1950s and ’60s, died Thursday night. He was 91.
The team said Friday the Hall of Famer died at his Long Island home in Lake Success, N.Y., while watching the Yankees in a playoff game. His wife of 69 years, Joan, and family members were with him.
Ford had suffered from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease in recent years. His death was the latest this year of a number of baseball greats — Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock and Bob Gibson.
On a franchise long defined by power hitters, Ford was considered its greatest starting pitcher. Not big and not overpowering, the wily left-hander played in the majors from 1950- 67, all with the Yankees, and teamed with the likes of Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra to win six championships.
“If you were a betting man, and if he was out there pitching for you, you’d figure it was your day,” former teammate and World Series MVP Bobby Richardson told The Associated Press on Friday.
Ford won 236 games and lost just 106, a winning percentage of .690. He would help symbolize the almost machinelike efficiency of the Yankees in the mid-20th century, when only twice between Ford’s rookie year and 1964 did they fail to make the World Series.
The blond-haired Ford was nicknamed “Whitey” while still in the minor leagues, and quickly reached the mound at Yankee Stadium.
His death occurred in a month when he for so long soared on baseball’s biggest stage, and hours before his Yankees played Tampa Bay in a decisive Game 5 of the AL Division Series. “He would have been the starting pitcher in this game for the Yankees in years past,” Richardson said.
The World Series record book is crowded with Ford’s accomplishments. His string of 33 consecutive scoreless innings from 1960- 62 broke a record of 29 2-3 innings set by Babe Ruth. Ford still holds records for World Series games and starts (22), innings pitched (146), wins (10) and strikeouts (94).
Yankees reliever Mariano Rivera, the only player unanimously elected to the Hall, let set the postseason record for consecutive innings — a majority of them in the AL playoffs.
“Whitey earned his status as the ace of some of the most memorable teams in our sport’s rich history,” baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said. “Beyond the Chairman of the Board’s excellence on the mound, he was a distinguished ambassador for our national pastime throughout his life.”
Ford died on the 64th anniversary of the single greatest pitching performance in Yankees history — Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. Larsen died on New Year’s Day this year.
Ford also made Oct. 8 a special day, surpassing Ruth’s mark for consecutive shutout innings on that date in the 1961 Series. Ford was the MVP of that Fall Classic, twice beating Cincinnati.
“Mickey was hurt and we had a lot of backups in there against the Reds,” teammate Tony Kubek told The Associated Press. “We won that because of Whitey’s pitching.”
Ford was in his mid-20s when he became the go-to guy in manager Casey Stengel’s rotation, the pitcher Stengel said he would always turn to if he absolutely needed to win one game. Ford was Stengel’s choice to pitch World Series openers eight times, another record.
Ford’s best seasons came in 1961 and 1963, in the midst of a stretch of five straight AL pennants for the Yankees, when new manager Ralph Houk began using a four-man rotation instead of five. Ford led the league in victories with 25 in 1961, won the Cy Young Award and starred in the World Series. In 1963, he went 24-7, again leading the league in wins. Eight of his victories that season came in June.
He also led the AL in earned run average in 1956 (2.47) and 1958 (2.01) and was an All-Star in eight seasons.
Ford did have his World Series disappointments. He spoke bitterly of the 1960 championship, when he shut out Pittsburgh twice but was used by Stengel in Game 3 and Game 6 and so was unavailable for the finale, won 10-9 by the Pirates on Bill Mazeroski’s home run in the bottom of the ninth. In 1963, Ford was outmatched twice by Sandy Koufax as the Los Angeles Dodgers swept the Yankees.
Ford was 10-8 with a 2.71 ERA overall in the World Series. His final appearance there came in the 1964 opener when he lost to Gibson and the St. Louis Cardinals.
Unlike Gibson and Koufax, Ford was not a power pitcher. Instead he depended on guile and guts, rarely giving hitters the same look on consecutive pitches. He’d throw overhand sometimes, threequarters other times, mixing curves and sliders in with his fastball and changeup.